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Street Scene is an American opera by Kurt Weill (music), Langston Hughes (lyrics), and Elmer Rice (book). Written in 1946 and premiered in Philadelphia that year, Street Scene is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning 1929 play of the same name by Rice.

It was Weill who referred to the piece as an "American opera", intending it as a groundbreaking synthesis of European traditional opera and American musical theater. He received the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work, after the Broadway premiere in 1947. Considered far more an opera than a musical, Street Scene is regularly produced by professional opera companies and has never been revived on Broadway. Musically and culturally, even dramatically, the work inhabits the mid-ground between Weill's Threepenny Opera (1928) and Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (1957).

The score contains operatic arias and ensembles, some of them, such as Anna Maurrant's "Somehow I Never Could Believe" and Frank Maurrant's "Let Things Be Like They Always Was", with links and references to the style of Giacomo Puccini. It also has jazz and blues influences in "I Got a Marble and a Star" and "Lonely House" (see image). Some of the more Broadway-style musical numbers are "Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow", "Wouldn't You Like to Be on Broadway?" and "Moon-faced, Starry-eyed", an extended song-and-dance sequence. Benny Goodman and His Orchestra recorded "Moon-Faced, Starry-Eyed" with Johnny Mercer on the vocal in 1947. It was also recorded by the jazz vocal group The Hi-Lo's for their 1958 Columbia LP And All That Jazz.

We especially know the compositions of Kurt Weill (1900 - 1950) from his German period, his collaboration with Bertolt Brecht which ends with the sung ballet The Seven Deadly Sins composed in 1933 before Weill emigrated to America in 1935. Much less well known is his abundant and prolific American production which made him famous in his adopted country, including his opera Street scene. Elmer Rice's libretto is based on his play of the same name, premiered in 1929, which was an immediate success and won the Pulitzer Prize. The play denounces the conditions in which emigrants and refugees survived in New York in the 1920s.

Director: Tim Murray (Conductor)
Cast: Orchestra and Choir from Teatro Real in Madrid, Abraham Kaplan: Geoffrey Dolton, Greta Fiorentino: Jeni Bern, Carl Olsen: Scott Wilde, Emma Jones: Lucy Schaufer, Olga Olsen: Harriet Williams, Henry Davis: Eric Greene, Anna Maurrant: Patricia Racette, Sam Kaplan: Joel Prieto, Daniel Buchanan: Tyler Clarke, George Jones: Gerardo Bullón, Lippo Fiorentino: Michael J. Scott, Rose Maurrant: Mary Bevan, Harry Easter: Richard Burkhard, Mae West / First Nursemaid: Sarah-Marie Maxwell, Dick McGann: Dominic Lamb, Second Nursemaid: Laurel Dougall